State Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, urged lawmakers to approve his measure authorizing more money for a California program that seizes guns from people who are prohibited from having them, at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, March 7, 2013. With eight Republicans voting with the Democratic majority, the bill, was approved by a 31-0 vote and sent to the Assembly.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Momentum is building behind efforts to require warrants to obtain e-mails and other digital communications from the businesses that store them.

In other words, laws covering e-mail might finally catch up to the protections afforded traditional letters, and just 40-some years after the technology was invented.

Mind you, there are no guarantees that things are about to change, but here are some promising signs:

-- State Sen. Mark Leno introduced legislation this week that would require state law enforcement agencies to secure warrants before seeking private digital communications on services like Gmail, Outlook, Facebook and Twitter.

-- Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, and others in Congress are pushing updates to the creaking 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act that would, among other things, require a warrant for all e-mails held by service providers. Meanwhile, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, this week introduced a bill requiring much the same thing.

-- The Department of Justice has finally dropped its objections to the proposed federal update, effectively acknowledging what most people have long seen: The rules are hopelessly illogical and out of date.

Under current federal law, e-mail messages that are 180 days old or less and unopened require a warrant for law enforcement to access them. But older e-mails or any that have been opened can be sought through court orders or subpoenas, which can be secured with far lower standards of evidence, court oversight or both.

Easier standards

The popular "D" orders, for instance, only require that the material being sought is "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation." To secure a warrant, a judge must agree there's probable cause to believe the search will uncover actual evidence of a crime.

The law was the product of an earlier age of technology, when e-mails often disappeared from corporate servers once downloaded to desktops - and anything left on servers as long as six months was clearly "abandoned." But it doesn't jibe with the modern reality of cloud computing, where many of us store most of our digital communications on the computers of private companies, often for years.

Acting U.S. Assistant Attorney General Elana Tyrangiel admitted as much. Testifying before a House judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday, she said there is no longer any logical basis for distinguishing between e-mails more or less than 180 days old, or unopened or not.

Leno hopes that passing the state bill would add pressure on Congress to act. But if not, it would at least limit the ability of state law enforcement agencies to dig into personal communications without probable cause. Several other states have proposed similar measures.

State's effort

Leno's bill includes exceptions for emergencies, such as when a person's life is at immediate risk.

Several major online companies, including Google and Yahoo, already push back on law enforcement requests that don't include a warrant. But Leno stressed there needs to be a binding standard that reflects the realities of 21st century communications.

"Law has not kept up with the rapid pace of innovation," he said. "The world has changed 10 times over since 1986."

Leno has been battling to update state privacy laws for the digital age. He proposed earlier bills that would have required warrants to search a person's cell phone in the course of an arrest, and to obtain location information from electronic devices.

Governor's vetoes

Neither became law, however, with Gov. Jerry Brown vetoing the latter proposal in September.

Leno said that there is significant bipartisan support on the issue of digital privacy but that law enforcement interests push back hard.

Of course, none of these proposals stop law enforcement from digging into communications when they have a convincing argument that it could provide evidence of a real crime - they just have to make that case to someone more objective than a motivated cop or district attorney.

This nation has a troubling history of snooping on citizens who have expressed unpopular opinions but not broken any laws. So it's entirely appropriate to apply our traditional legal safeguards to prevent law enforcement from fishing through our intimate troves of digital correspondence on a hunch.

"A letter you keep in a shoe box at home and an e-mail or photograph you store on your laptop or in the cloud all deserve the same legal protection," said Chris Conley, technology and civil liberties fellow at the ACLU of Northern California.